Why one Silicon Valley exec says every CEO should be part Moses, and part Galileo

Be yourself. Be authentic. But if you want to be CEO, you might have to to do it twice over.

"What I found as CEO is that you almost need a split personality," says Tae Hea Nahm, managing director of the venture capital firm Storm Ventures, and previously the founding CEO of AireSpace/Cisco.

In an interview with Adam Bryant at the New York Times, he explains the inherent conflict that comes with being in charge: you need to be Moses, but you also need to be Galileo.

"On the one hand, you have to appear like Moses, so that people believe that you're going to take them to the Promised Land. And you have to present a very simple, clear path to success," he says.

But getting people to follow you is only half the battle, he continues. While you have to project total confidence in your plan, you also can't buy into your own hype.

"If you believe all of that, you can easily run the company off a cliff," Nahm warns. You need faith, but "for making decisions, sometimes truth and faith are different."

That's why being Moses isn't enough - you also need to be Galileo. "You have to be a skeptic," he explains to Bryant. "You can have beliefs, but you have to really search for the truth, which is often tied to bad news."

Read the whole interview at the New York Times.